In an unusual twist for a Telephone Consumer Protection Act case, a TCPA class-action defendant sought Wednesday in U.S. District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to hold its telemarketing vendor accountable for all damages and court costs should the plaintiff and his putative class members win the case.

Protesters called on the FCC to hold a vote on the Standard/Tegna deal Thursday morning at a demonstration outside FCC headquarters, prompting the agency to remind open meeting attendees of the agency’s rules. Though Standard General Managing Partner Soohyung Kim has said he believes three commissioners can force a vote on the deal, one of those commissioners seen as supportive of the transaction said Thursday he doesn’t believe that is possible. “There is no mechanism in FCC rules for non-chair commissioners, no matter how many of them are in support of a particular position, to force a vote on anything,” Commissioner Brendan Carr said in a news conference.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a majority opinion Thursday (docket 21-56107), upheld the district court’s denial of Amazon’s motion to compel to arbitration Amazon Flex driver Drickey Jackson's privacy claims on behalf of himself and a nationwide class of Flex drivers. Flex drivers use their own cars to deliver goods they retrieve from Whole Foods stores, Amazon Fresh locations and other local markets.

PBS denies any and all allegations in plaintiff Jazmine Harris’ class actions that it violated the Video Privacy Protection Act by disclosing its digital subscribers’ identities and viewing activity to Facebook without the proper consent, said PBS’ answer Monday (docket 1:22-cv-02456) in U.S. District Court for Northern Georgia in Atlanta.

The government “should not be able to mask its censorship behind the guise of private action,” said the Alliance Defending Freedom Tuesday in an amicus brief (docket 3:22-cv-01213) filed in support of Republican attorneys general in a First Amendment case against Biden administration officials in U.S. District Court for Western Louisiana in Monroe.

Plaintiff Shlomy Halawani, a “serial litigant,” alleges Charter Communications called his phone a single time using a prerecorded voice message to market Spectrum services, in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection and the Florida Telephone Solicitation Act (see 2303100055), but Charter said the “jurisdictional evidence” shows it never called him. The company filed a motion Monday (docket 0:23-cv-60453) in U.S. District Court for Southern Florida in Fort Lauderdale to dismiss Halawani’s putative class action for lack of personal jurisdiction.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson for Northern California in Oakland sided with the plaintiffs in the multidistrict litigation against the major social media companies, when he decided during a remote discovery hearing Wednesday (see 2304180048) to limit the scope of the court's Rule 502(d) order that will govern discovery as the MDL moves forward.

Here are Communications Litigation Today's top stories from last week, in case you missed them. Each can be found by searching on its title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.

Plaintiffs Craigville Telephone and Consolidated Telephone worry that defendant T-Mobile may want to depose competing wireless carriers in its defense of allegations it inserted fake local ring-back tones instead of connecting calls to rural areas in the U.S. that have expensive routing fees (see 2212230004), said a joint status report Monday (docket 1:19-cv-07190) in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in Chicago. The fake tone would make the caller think the recipient didn’t answer, although the call hadn't been delivered.

Having compromised the highly personal sensitive information of millions of individuals, T-Mobile now wrongfully seeks to delay “the prosecution of claims related to their misconduct” by “piggybacking” on a transfer motion filed with the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Ligation to completely and indefinitely stay all proceedings against them, pending the JPML’s decision. So said the plaintiffs’ opposition brief Monday (docket 3:23-cv-00427) in Shoemaker v. T-Mobile in U.S. District Court for Southern California in San Diego.